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Israel has killed nearly 300 Palestinian journalists since the start of the Gaza genocide, marking the most journalist killings ever committed by a state. Among the slain journalists are Anas al-Sharif, Hossam Shabat, and Salah al-Ja’farawi, whose news reports were watched by millions around the world. They continued to report live from the frontlines of the genocide even amid the loss of their own families and death threats from Israeli officials.
Israel has also reduced more than 150 media organizations and news offices to rubble, and has repeatedly bombed tents where journalists are known to shelter and work.
Palestinian media scholar Said Abu Moalla writes that these attacks amount to what he calls “journalistic genocide,” or the targeted mass destruction of the press. Israel is wiping out every part of Gaza’s press, as well as barring international journalists, to ensure its crimes can escalate without any witnesses or evidence that could stop it and hold it accountable. Or, as Abu Moalla puts it, “to arrive at total silence.”
But violence of such massive scale and severity against an entire social sector does not come from nowhere. Israel’s unfolding journalistic genocide in Gaza reflects a pattern of attacks against Palestinian journalists and news outlets. This pattern can be traced to when Israel started colonizing Palestine a century ago as a then-small project called Zionism.
Press Censorship as Zionist Settler-Colonial Violence
Zionism is the settler-colonial project behind the State of Israel. It is bent on eliminating the Indigenous Palestinian people from Palestine to replace them with a Jewish settler majority. To achieve this goal, the Zionist project has deployed various weapons against Palestinians over the past century, like forced mass displacement, destruction of olive trees, denial of refugees’ right to return, and now genocide.
Press censorship is another weapon for furthering this project. Palestinian journalist Omar Nazzal explains that Zionism’s process of elimination and replacement “requires [that the Palestinian people’s] voice is silenced, [their] narrative is contradicted, [their] journalists are murdered, [their] media is destroyed, and [their] communications with the outside world are terminated.”
Israel’s press censorship has always been, first and foremost, intended to strip Palestinians of the ability to narrate their existence.
1922-1947: British Occupation
In 1922, the League of Nations published the “Mandate of Palestine,” which greenlit the British colonial takeover of Palestine. One of Britain’s main duties under the mandate was to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home” on the very land that Palestinians had lived on for centuries. During its occupation, Britain backed Zionist settlement and even trained Zionist militias, all while suppressing Palestinians, including their press freedom.
By the 1920s, there were already dozens of independent Palestinian newspapers raising awareness about the British sponsorship of the Zionist project. Newspapers like Falastin and al-Karmil became major forums for the Palestinian movement for self-determination, which Britain soon realized. After the 1929 Buraq Uprising against the influx of Zionist settlers, the British occupation started targeting the press to stop the spread of Palestinian nationalism. In 1933, it passed the Press Ordinance, a law that allowed British authorities to close dissenting Palestinian newspapers under the guise of “public peace.”
(Illustration in “La Domenica del Corriere” by A. Raimondi via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
But Palestinian anger continued to swell in the 1930s, until it burst in 1936 as a three-year uprising called the ‘Great Revolt.’ As part of its campaign to crush the revolt, the British occupation used both legal and military tactics against the Palestinian press. It revised the Press Ordinance to allow the closure of any publication, including literary magazines, for as long as British authorities wished. Many Palestinian writers and editors refused to be silenced, and so were subject to imprisonment or expulsion. The Palestinian press also faced attacks from Zionist militias. In the earliest documented attack, Zionists raided the Huna al-Quds radio station and killed journalist Akram al-Husaini in 1939.
After the revolt, the British occupation passed the Emergency Regulations to further tighten its military control over Palestinians. Under the regulations, editors were forced to send articles to British military censors for review. There was consequently less and less information coming from Palestine about the escalating Zionist violence. In 1947, Britain withdrew from Palestine, leaving behind an infrastructure of press censorship that the Zionist militias would take over a year later.
1947-1967: Nakba and Naksa
Between 1947 and 1948, the British-trained Zionist militias committed an ethnic cleansing campaign known as the ‘Nakba’ or ‘Catastrophe’ that devastated the Palestinian press along with the rest of Palestinian society. Palestinian newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and printing presses, largely based on Palestine’s coast, were destroyed, seized, or displaced to the West Bank or Jordan. Many Palestinian journalists were either killed or forcibly expelled, a fate that tens of thousands of other Palestinian civilians faced at the hands of Zionist militias.
After the Nakba, the newly-created State of Israel kept the Press Ordinance and Emergency Regulations from the British occupation-era. And so, the press came under the Israeli military’s control, which pushed the few remaining Palestinian publications underground. The Press Ordinance was revoked in 2017, but the Emergency Regulations are in place til this day.
In 1967, Israel committed another ethnic cleansing campaign called the ‘Naksa’ or the ‘Setback,’ displacing over 400,000 Palestinians and occupying the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem. After the Naksa, Israel seized the territories’ press infrastructure and passed Military Order 101, which banned newspapers it considered “propagandistic,” or in other words, challenged its settler-colonial myths. Even television and radio broadcasting were banned in the occupied territories until as late as the mid-1990s, when the Palestinian Authority was created after the Oslo Accords.
1987-2005: Intifadas
By the 1980s, Israel controlled every stage of news production in the West Bank and Gaza, deciding which newspapers could operate and what information they could publish. This control was so tight that even weather reports and crossword puzzles could not be published without first being reviewed by Israeli military censors. If editors defied the censors, they were punished with severe military orders. In 1973, Israel imprisoned al-Fajr editors Joseph Nasr and Jamil Hamad for their article exposing Israeli-Jordanian intelligence coordination. In another case, in 1986, Israel expelled prominent editor and activist Akram Haniyah and barred him from returning despite global outrage.
Cases like these became common during the First Intifada, an uprising between 1987 and 1993, when Israel imposed its “Iron Fist” policy to crack down on Palestinian speech and activism. Israel imprisoned nearly 50 Palestinian journalists in 1987 alone. But Palestinian journalists were undeterred. “I always write. Whether or not it gets censored, I must try,” journalist Jawdat Mana’a told the Columbia Journalism Review in 1988.
When the Second Intifada erupted in 2000, Israel’s attacks on the Palestinian press turned more violent than at any point since the Nakba. Palestinian journalists were regularly hit by Israeli tear gas and live bullets, even while wearing press vests and reporting from a distance during military raids. The national broadcasting outlets Voice of Palestine and Palestine TV were also raided and bombed multiple times. In 2001, an investigation by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) found that Israeli forces were “deliberately targeting” Palestinian journalists.
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By 2004, CPJ named the West Bank and Gaza the “most dangerous and unpredictable assignments for journalists.” That same year, Israeli forces shot and killed student journalist Mohamed Abu Halima while he was reporting on an Israeli raid in a Nablus refugee camp. Israel accused him of being a militant without any evidence and despite eyewitnesses saying otherwise. Israel’s killing and smearing of Abu Halima set a precedent that unfolded most brutally and visibly in Gaza.
2008-2021: Gaza Assaults
After the Second Intifada ended in 2005, Israel moved to isolate Gaza to crush its growing resistance. Israel imposed a siege on the strip in 2007, and then launched the first of four large-scale military assaults in 2008. Gaza’s journalists and press infrastructure were major targets of these regular assaults.
During its 2008 assault, Israel bombed Al-Aqsa TV’s office and, in a separate attack, killed Reuters cameraman Fadel Shana’a. In its second assault in 2012, Israel carried out multiple waves of airstrikes on two buildings with the offices of international and local news outlets. Al-Aqsa TV was especially targeted, with nothing but rubble left of its office. Israel also killed three journalists during that assault: director of Al-Quds’ Educational Radio Mohamed Abu Aisha, as well as Al-Aqsa TV cameramen Mahmoud al-Kumi and Hussam Salam.
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Israel launched its third assault in 2014 and, once again, bombed the offices of local news outlets, including Al-Aqsa TV. Most disturbingly, though, Israel killed seven journalists in under a month. These targeted attacks further spiralled in the 2018 March of Return protests, with Israeli sniper fire killing two journalists and wounding more than 140 others. In 2021, during its last assault before the genocide, Israel killed one journalist and two journalism graduates and destroyed the offices of 30 news outlets.
Israel spent two decades demonizing Gaza’s press to make these unlawful attacks appear justified. Palestinian journalists were continuously called “terrorists” and “Hamas operatives” by Israeli officials. They’ve also accused local news outlets of holding “Hamas military assets” without evidence. But Israel did not manufacture consent for its eventual journalistic genocide on its own; it did so with the support of Western institutions.
Partners in Journalistic Genocide
The United Nations and Western regimes, who claim to champion press freedom, have never done anything tangible to hold Israel accountable for its repeated press violations in Gaza and the rest of Palestine. They have yet to conduct independent investigations or persecute those behind the killings of Palestinian journalists. Instead, Western regimes, foremost of them the US, have continued to fund the Israeli military, emboldening it to intensify its attacks on the Palestinian press.
Their deliberate inaction became especially clear after Israeli forces killed renowned Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akelh in 2022. As Palestinian human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan writes: “If justice could be denied to Shireen by her own government [the US], how can we expect justice for Palestinian journalists in Gaza or any other journalists working in the killing fields of Palestine and Lebanon?”
(Photo by Al Jazeera Media Network via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Western media is another institution long complicit in Israel’s press violations. The killing of Palestinian journalists rarely makes mainstream coverage and, when it does, it’s framed around Israeli accusations. This biased coverage is the result of entrenched Zionism in Western newsrooms. Ex-Israeli military and intelligence officers are in senior roles at major news outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and Axios. These newsrooms also enforce style guidelines consistent with the Israeli narrative, forbidding terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “genocide” that human rights groups have concluded are accurate.
Last year, 277 news outlets from around the world demanded protections for Palestinian journalists in Gaza. But not one mainstream Western news outlet, including CNN and BBC, joined the campaign. Almost three years into the genocide, these outlets have only demanded one thing: entry into Gaza. Their reports remain overwhelmingly biased against Palestinians, and their journalists remain embedded with the Israeli military despite its mass targeted killing of their Palestinian colleagues.
What Our Solidarity with Palestinian Journalists Should Look Like
Our advocacy for press freedom in Palestine should not ignore the wider settler-colonial reality that Palestinian journalists have reported under for a century. Like every sector of Palestinian society, the press has been the target of unrelenting disinformation, expulsion, incarceration, and assassination, all aiming to erase the Palestinian people’s narrative and right to self-determination. The journalistic genocide in Gaza is a continuation of this erasure, not an exceptional or singular violation.
So when we call for an end to the journalistic genocide, we must also confront the century-old system that churned it out: Western-backed Zionist settler colonialism. If we do not take action against the structures that make up and hold up this system, Palestinian journalists will never be free to report.
- Stop reading and contributing to complicit Western news outlets.
- Contact the editors at your local and national news outlets and tell them to use ethical style guidelines on Palestine.
- Contact your elected officials and tell them to demand accountability for Israel’s press violations and to support sanctions on Israel.
- Organize protests against the companies making weapons for Israel, which are being used to kill Palestinian journalists.
- Read, cite, follow, translate, and share Palestinian journalism, including: Palestine Chronicle, Electronic Intifada, Quds News Network, Palestine News and Information Agency, Bisan Owda, Leila Warah, Raneen Abhara, Mohammad Mansour, and Jehad Abu Shammala.
- Donate what you can to the International Federation of Journalists’ Safety Fund to help ensure that Palestinian journalists have the resources to keep reporting and resisting erasure.
Edited by Isaac Code
